Ah, January is upon us: The wind is howling, the thermometer is plummeting, and we are greeted by the nineteenth consecutive edition of Quality Counts,Education Week’s compilation of mostly useful data, analysis, rankings, and commentaries.
by Charles Blahousvia e21, Economic Policies for the 21st Century
Thursday, January 15, 2015
For years Social Security’s trustees (of which I am one) have warned that lawmakers must act to address the troubled finances of the program’s disability insurance (DI) trust fund. Congress has nearly run out of time to do so. Legislation will be required during this Congress or, at the very latest, in a rush at the beginning of the next one, to prevent large sudden benefit cuts.
Commentators on both the left and the right are slamming President Obama for missing the march in Paris last Sunday. Even a stalwart courtier like CNN’s Jake Tapper sniffed that he was “ashamed” that the U.S. was represented by an ambassador––one, by the way, who got her appointment by bundling money for the president’s political campaigns. But who’s surprised at this latest display of diplomatic incompetence?
As President John F Kennedy once quipped, the rising tide lifts all boats; but one only needs to compare San Francisco and Stockton - cities just 80 miles apart - to question whether the rising tide lifts all boats equally. California has recovered all of the jobs the state lost during the recent recession. But that doesn't necessarily mean the state's job market is uniformly doing well.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice believes that the world is still a very dangerous place, and that the Edward Snowden revelations have handcuffed American intelligence in the fight against terror.
featuring Thomas Sowellvia News Busters, Media Research Center
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
"Whether one is a conservative or a radical, a protectionist or a free trader, a cosmopolitan or a nationalist, a churchman or a heathen, it is useful to know the causes and consequences of economic phenomena." That quotation, from Nobel laureate George J. Stigler, is how Dr. Thomas Sowell begins the fifth edition of Basic Economics.
Talent. We’re not always sure what it is, but we know we want some. But do we truly value talent? How well do we manage it? Do we really manage talent at all?
Instead of too much inflation, as so many hand-wringers were worrying about a few years ago, we now find ourselves with too little. Maybe it’s about time the Federal Reserve did something about it.
In his office on the second floor of the British Museum, Barrie Cook, the curator of an exhibition on Germany, cheerfully pointed out that this part of the building was entirely flattened by a German firebomb in 1941.
